


sweet and comely as Jerusalem

by dissembler



Category: Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
Genre: M/M, Self-Pity, leprosy, talking about sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:07:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26493139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: The king of Jerusalem considers one of the lesser discussed but no less keenly felt of his losses.
Relationships: Baldwin IV of Jerusalem/Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub | Saladin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	sweet and comely as Jerusalem

Baldwin receives Saladin alone in his rooms. At least it can be read as an honour. 

The pretence of that holds true for both of them. For Saladin, a private reception shows that he is respected, rather than smuggled in to avoid the men who, defying their own king, would try to kill him: rather trusted, held in high regard. For Baldwin, the honour of it and the need to protect Saladin both hide a growing dependency. These rooms contain everything Baldwin needs – his doctors already do not wish for him to go far unless absolutely necessary – and so of an entire citadel they are all he has to truly call his own. One a room of tables; a desk here, a chessboard there; the others a bedroom, a room with a bath that the doctors fill with water still hot from its spring to soothe him, and another solar even further from the court for the worst days. 

Tonight these beautiful rooms do nothing but rankle. Tonight, Baldwin is low enough to resent. He walks, slowly, to where Saladin sits watching the smoke from an incense lamp rise. “Were I a woman, my people should think that with such gifts you had come courting,” he says when he is close enough for his whisper-rasp to carry. 

Saladin does not startle, merely stands and greets Baldwin in his custom. He is unfailingly courteous, respectful and distanced as always. Even so, when his eyes light on Baldwin’s face – mask – tonight they stay there, and that is impolite, but it is justified. He stares as anyone would when seeing their own gifts displayed, a work of art put on show, a carpet used, a mask worn. 

“Perhaps,” Baldwin continues, taking his seat – were they in Damascus, at a Muslim court, Baldwin might be required to sit lower, on cushions upon the floor, to be helped down and then up again afterwards, but he cannot think that Saladin would be so cruel. Baldwin does feel cruel tonight, preoccupied with his inabilities, lashing out, “Perhaps, even if I were that I am, but unmarked, they would still think so.” 

Across the scant space between them, flowing with sweet perfumed smoke, Baldwin can still manage to see Saladin’s fine eyes narrow, his strong lips tug down. He has an able mouth, a good beard. His face shows age, an earned gravitas, and though with it he betrays so little, at least the skin can move.

Baldwin sighs, a long exhale that scratches at his lungs like the very air has grown claws, and remembers himself. “No insult was meant, my friend. You find us rueful tonight.” Rueful, among other things. He lifts his dextrous hand, or at least the one more so than the mere slab of rotting meat and fused silver on the end of his other arm, to the metal of the mask. “It is beautiful, you have our thanks and our apologies.”

Saladin nods, accepting both. Once again he looks at it, his eyes moving over the raised brows, the slope of the nose, the bow of the mouth. “It is a good likeness,” he says and Baldwin manages a chuckle. It is an idealised likeness, it is Baldwin’s face at sixteen aged into an Apollo and given a beard that the flesh beneath will only ever struggle to grow. It is the greatest of kindnesses, and yet his first urge upon receipt of it had been to hurl it from him, just as his first instinct on seeing Saladin tonight had been to hurt him. 

“You ought to demand it back,” he says, forgoing the pluralis majestatis now his official thanks is given. “I have not been so churlish since I was very young.”

“You’ve more reason to be than many.”

“Then I am forgiven?”

Saladin smiles, small but kind. His sympathy is not cloying, he looks as though he understands. “You were never held in the wrong,” he says. “You must be tired.”

He is, but less than he had been. “When I flag,” Baldwin confesses, for Saladin’s eyes are fixed to his now, the mask forgotten, and all of his ire at the very facts of the man – his health, his strength, his lined face and skilled, aged hands – has bled away. “I seek to abdicate. But God never allows it.”

“I cannot say that I am sorry for it.”

Under his mask, Baldwin smiles for a single moment then he remembers the futility. He makes some noise of amusement instead and inclines his head. “No. And as it is, my health has always rallied.” He shifts his eyes to the coiling smoke from the burner next to them. “But I have always lost something.”

Saladin does not respond. Baldwin does not blame him, these days he seems only fit to inspire silences. But then...

“Tell me,” Saladin says, and when he folds his long legs, it brings his knee under black robes close to touching Baldwin’s own clad in white and he does not flinch away. “Tell me your losses.”

This time Baldwin forces what is left of his mouth into a laugh. “You cannot make them right,” he says. “Nor should you indulge an ailing man to list his troubles.”

Saladin merely waits.

They both know that there are many things he could list, and for propriety and dignity’s sake Baldwin knows there are many he should list first, but of all his losses – the heirs that will never be born, the long life that won’t be lived, the faculties that he has known only too briefly, the legacy that rests uncertain, the city that without him might fall – the ones that bite into his soul tonight are the ones that matter the least. The mask, though the meaning behind it is pure and generous, for now only serves to remind Baldwin of his most recent loss: his beauty. And that leads by turn to the most shallow thing to mope about. “You cannot make them right,” he says again, then does as Saladin has asked and tells him, “I will die young, untouched.”

Saladin’s eyes show his surprise only minutely but Baldwin sees it, he braces for the silence to return. Instead Saladin begins, “Were you not the king of my people’s enemies–” then stops, and begins again, “Were you not–”

Baldwin interrupts him to suggest, wry, expecting nothing, “Were all things changed.” 

“Not all things,” says Saladin.

Now it is Baldwin’s turn to register surprise and there is an advantage to his affliction: he cannot move the skin around his eyes easily at the best of times, he can hardly show anything involuntarily. He thinks, even were he not unclean it would still be a sin for both of them, a sin from the same story changed barely at all in the telling only substituting Lot for Luti, and he finds himself unable to care. He is likely already damned, for though God sends leprosy either as a curse or a sign of love and no priest can make up his mind, the last pope had said this was judgment. The last pope is dead now, and yet Baldwin lives. Baldwin lives and has to believe that God is merciful, that God will not begrudge a dying man imagining passions shared.

“Tell me,” he asks, breath coming short for a reason other than illness for once. “Were I neither king nor leper...”

Saladin leans forward, pitches his voice low. His eyes on Baldwin are direct, heated. “Were it possible,” he says, “I would lie you down in silks of rich colours, reds and purples and blues. The milk-white of your skin and the shining gold of your hair would glow there. We would drink, and the wine would loosen us. In this bed there would be no cares of state, only bodies and the joy of them.”

Baldwin can barely remember feeling joy of his body but he imagines it now, imagines Saladin’s hands on his skin. Touching the places that on anyone else would be delicate: the inside of his wrists to make him shiver, the length of his inner thigh from the knee up. His only frame of reference is Sibylla, her skin is pale and thin and in a just world so would his be. She is sensitive and so Baldwin would feel everything. 

“No-one need be debased,” Saladin tells him, “there is pleasure to be had without that. I would bring my hands over the curve of your slim waist, your hips, then lower.”

Their age is too bloody to make poets of them but something in Saladin’s words strikes Baldwin as having rhythm, a cadence half lost in translation. A Saracen Song of Songs. He closes his eyes and lets the images come, and the ghosts of half-remembered, half-invented sensation. 

A beautiful boy, golden haired and blue eyed, lays down with Saladin and Saladin takes hold of him. They move and the boy’s body bows, his thin white hands grasping Saladin’s lean, swordsman’s arms for purchase, for tether. Saladin is generous, seeks the pleasure of his partner before his own and the boy, having skin that could still react with shivers and gooseflesh, is responsive.

Saladin continues, “I would kiss the hollow at the base of your throat as we moved together, slowly, for the joy of it. And reaching the height of our pleasure, find eternity in enjoyment.”

“Eternity in enjoyment,” Baldwin repeats. He had felt eternity once before, on the battlefield at Montgisard with Saladin against him. He can easily imagine feeling eternity of another kind with the same man. The poets conflate battle with bed all the time; the opponent sees vulnerability, sees truth, the same as the lover does. The joy, he imagines, is much the same, between victory and ecstasy. He holds on to the memory of that feeling, how it burnt through his body like a conflagration and loosed his soul to the heavens like a mass. If that is what awaits at the end of carnality, at least he has felt of it once. He tells Saladin this.

Saladin reaches across the small space between them and takes up Baldwin’s gloved hand, tangles their fingers together. Baldwin has just enough feeling left there to know it, to curl his fingers and hold on. It is pity, but he finds again the strength to accept it. “It is much like that,” Saladin confirms. “They are comparable.”

“Thank you,” Baldwin says, and Saladin must know that it is for more than just the mask. Though he will still die young, at least now, when every so often he regrets the loss of this most shallow thing, he will remember the conjured image of Saladin’s hands on his skin and not feel so untouched.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the Song of Solomon, 6:2: Thou art beautiful, O my love, sweet and comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army set in array.


End file.
